The Crocodile Hunter by Gerald Seymour (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

Cammy said, “Don’t talk to people, don’t move away. I’ll get milk and some bread and some cheese.”

He held out his hand and some euros were pushed into his palm. Given enough cash to buy a restaurant meal and a litre of house wine to go with it. He had been scrupulous on each stop-over to show what he had bought in their name and give them their change. Taking the money and saying what he would buy was probably insufficient to calm their fear that he was quitting on them. They had details of ‘a contact’ who would have made deep inroads into the wads of cash they carried and who would get them into a dinghy for the Channel crossing.

“You speak with your contact, but I vet them and I decide on them. I’ll be back.”

He had not been in Bordeaux by chance. Had been told to be there. Cammy was now a valued commodity. He was moved forward with the same foresight that an expert at a game of checkers would have employed when sending a piece further into “enemy” territory on a board. That division of the old security system, now controlling him, was Amaiyet al-Kharji – deep sleepers in European cities, who showed no sign of waking. They gathered intelligence far from the war zones of Syria and Iraq, moved players, looked for new weaknesses to exploit, and required willing bodies. They had Kami al-Britani, and recognised the depth of his hatred. The networks would not have known his name, or the target that he would launch against. When he had arrived in Bordeaux his journey was further plotted.

Cammy thought it inevitable that the Iranian family would now believe he planned to abandon them; already they had learned to depend on him.

“I will come back. You have my promise.”

He would come back to them because he was alone. Before, he had been with Tomas who valued the strength of their section of foreigners: Better to hang together, not separately – his catchphrase and he was loved for it. Pieter, unfailingly cheerful when there was no justification: Never look back, never chase the past, however grim the outlook, and the line buckling and the air attacks screaming closer. Had been with Mikki, dour but strong: Life is short, live it, never taking a step back in a fire fight. Dwayne, Canadian, droll and dry, who used a quote from the Marx gang: Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse, and once with small arms fire crackling around them, and American rangers as opposition, they had all pealed with laughter when he’d said it from the shallow bottom of a make-do foxhole. Stanislau, the dreamer, the sensitive guy who could make them pause and think: I want to snatch the sunset and hold it, and they would all, however awful the day, look to the west and see the sun drop, the sky become crimson, and see beauty. And had been with Ulrike who was the woman who fought with them, killed with them, messed with them and brought what they all said was a German’s logic to the party: Stay calm, it is never a crisis, and had been worshipped by all of them. Had been with them all, one battle after another, one retreat following hard on the last, and all of them surviving together, as if their arms were linked. He was alone. Had never been alone before, wherever he had been, whatever queued in front of him as a challenge, whatever smacked him down.

Being alone was like being trapped by the hymn’s “snares of hell”.

He had the pocket full of phones that had been given him in Bordeaux. Use and ditch was the instruction. The guy had refused him more money but had given him phones. A meeting off the rue des Etrangers, close to the old German submarine pens. He had waited by the indestructible concrete walls and the guy had pitched up on a shiny new Peugeot scooter. Had told Cammy where he had to be and when, given him a schedule to be back in England, and had implied that the hardware was already on the move. How was he to get there without travel documents or cash? The guy had shrugged, not his problem. Cammy had thought the guy probably knew his life expectancy, calculated he was not worth more money, and that he would have the skills and the resources to get himself where he had been tasked to be and hold to the timetable.

He could not see the sea but the wind tousled his hair and blew cold across his face, and in his nose was its smell as the tide turned and carried it further up the beach and nearer the dunes. He had seen people in dips in the sand, small groups of men who eyed him with suspicion, and he had not made eye contact, and behind some of the men crouched their women and small children. He thought it would be a sellers’ market for the people who had the boats, small dinghies . . . He would go into the water along with the Iranians he had befriended. He was alone; he needed them.

The number he called was locked inside the phone; he had only to press one key. He would aim to cross the Channel by small boat because it was said that the lorry and ferry routes, and the tunnel, were now too heavily policed for him to have a chance of success.

The call rang out. It was also said that since the collapse of the caliphate’s structure, the forgery of passports was no longer of the standard required for the checks at Calais or at Dover, at Ostend or Zeebrugge, Felixstowe or Portsmouth.

The call was answered, a woman’s voice, hesitant and cautious. He gave his name, Kami al-Britani. Said where he was, and what he hoped for, what time schedule . . . She interrupted him, gabbled a